Advertisers have always been adept at pivoting to new technologies—from newspapers to radio to television to digital, streaming, and beyond. Today, the industry is looking at its next great evolution with the rise of new artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities. While marketers have long used AI for modeling and measurement, newer generative AI tools have seen a surge of interest over the past year for their potential to help streamline the development of advertising creative. Amazon Ads has launched image generation in beta—a generative AI solution designed to remove creative barriers and enable brands to produce lifestyle imagery that can help improve their ads’ performance.
“Providing tools to make image generation simple and easy is another way for us to support advertisers while also making the ads our customers see more engaging and visually rich,” said Colleen Aubrey, senior vice president at Amazon Ads Products and Technology. “It’s a perfect use for generative AI: less effort and better outcomes.”
At unBoxed, the flagship Amazon Ads event, Aubrey and Sudipta Sengupta, vice president and distinguished scientist of database and AI at Amazon Web Services (AWS), discussed the new image-generation solution and how advancements in AI can open up more possibilities for advertisers and consumers.
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Though AI and machine learning have been around since the 1950s, this technology has seen an increase in excitement over the past few years as it has become seamlessly integrated into everyday products and services. For example, when consumers see Sponsored Products ads on Amazon, ask Alexa for the weather, or find a new series on Prime Video, they’re interacting with AI and machine learning.
As Sengupta explained, generative AI provides exciting opportunities for advertisers because of its ability to create new content—like titles, descriptions, and images for ads based on a variety of inputs.
“While content creation is the epitome of human creativity, generative models have shown immense potential for doing some of that work for us—not necessarily replacing but helping us get there faster,” Sengupta said. “Advertisers now have a creative assistant of sorts to help augment their knowledge and expertise.”
Sengupta also discussed how Amazon Ads customers can harness new advancements in technology from AWS.
“Databases and machine learning are coming together to make sense of more data, even unstructured data like blog posts and product reviews,” Sengupta said. “Interacting with this type of data is becoming more natural and conversational; natural language is your new SQL.”
As Aubrey explained, Amazon Ads regularly uses over 125 of the more than 200 services that AWS has available to build and deliver products to advertisers, publishers, and partners.
For example, Amazon Ads uses Amazon SageMaker–the flagship AWS machine learning managed service that helps developers, data scientists, and business analysts quickly and easily prepare data, and build, train, and deploy high-quality machine-learning models at scale–to power upgrades to the Amazon DSP. Since releasing these upgrades, there has been a 34% increase in return on ad spend and a 20% upswing in incremental addressability on inventory that had previously been unaddressable.1
Going forward, Sengupta said AI will continue to play an essential role in advertising.
“AI will be absolutely critical in helping businesses and brands optimize their marketing investments to make faster, better decisions,” Sengupta said. “Top marketing teams will partner across their broader organization and data silos to leverage their cloud services and glean insights that increase the impact of their advertising.”
Creative production has always been a barrier for advertisers who may not have access to the resources to create copy, imagery, or video. In fact, a March 2023 Amazon survey found that among advertisers who were unable to build successful campaigns, nearly 75% cited building ad creative and choosing a creative format as their biggest challenge.2
“Producing engaging and differentiated creative can increase cost and often requires introducing additional expertise to the advertising process,” Aubrey said. “At Amazon Ads, we’re always thinking about ways we can reduce friction for our advertisers, provide them with tools that deliver more impact while minimizing effort, and ultimately deliver a better advertising experience for our customers.”
This solution is helpful for advertisers of all sizes—enabling advertisers who do not have in-house capabilities or agency support to more easily create brand-themed imagery, while also supporting bigger brands that are constantly looking at ways to be more efficient around creative development.
The image-generation capability is easy to use and requires no technical expertise. Within the Amazon ad console, advertisers simply select their product and click “Generate.” The tool then leverages generative AI to deliver a set of lifestyle- and brand-themed images, based on product details, in a matter of seconds. The image can then be refined by entering short text prompts, while multiple versions can be quickly created and tested to optimize performance.
“With the launch of our image-generation capability, any advertiser can now leverage a simple and easy tool to create unique lifestyle creatives that makes their campaigns more compelling, and at no additional cost,” Aubrey said.
This beta is initially available to select advertisers for their Sponsored Brands campaigns. Amazon Ads will continuously improve the experience based on customer feedback and expand availability over time.
SOURCE: AdvertisingAmazon